Hayford Peirce: Deep-Fried Black Diamonds

“ ‘A proprietary secret,’ ” I murmured, nodding slowly.

“Is that not the term used by certain companies, such as Coca-Cola, for products which they do not wish to register with the patent office? If there is no patent, as I understand it, then there is no need to ever reveal the exact composition of the product.”

“Absolutely correct. But there’s always the chance that someone else might use chemical analysis or reverse engineering to duplicate—”

“A chance that we shall have to take, Mr. White.” Ling Wong Guoy’s voice was firm.

“We? A chance in doing what?”

The outer Solar System’s greatest chef leaned forward. “With enough capital for certain improvements on my little farm, Mr. White, we could soon be harvesting 2,000 truffles per month. Eventually, within three or four years at the most, we could increase that to 10,000 per month.” He smiled blandly. “I will leave it to you to make the resulting calculations.” My ethical stockbroker’s brain had already made them.

Truffles were selling for 270 buckles an ounce in Paris. And Ling Wong Guoy could produce seventeen-ounce ones, up to 10,000 a month of them! Even if he only netted 50 buckles an ounce after subtracting all of his costs and overhead, that would still be in the neighborhood of 20.4 to 102 million buckles net profit per year!

I didn’t believe my brain. So I whispered the figures into my computer—and got the same results.

I stared at Ling Wong Guoy with ever-increasing awe. “That is a lot of money, Mr. Ling Wong Guoy.”

“Yes. I have come to you to help me raise the necessary capital in order to begin generating it. Jin Tshei tells me that you, Mr. White, are without equal on Ceres when it comes to raising capital.”

I gulped softly and apologized silently to Jin Tshei for ever having doubted her, even momentarily. “I do indeed have some ideas, sir. Why don’t we just step over to the Café des Mondes to discuss them?”

That evening I met Isabel for drinks at the same table of the Café des Mondes at which I had sat with Ling Wong Guoy. I was hardly able to keep from bouncing up and down with excitement. Bouncing is something to be avoided in the low Cerean gravity: any bouncing here would have lifted me up against the café’s green and white striped awning—and maybe on through it to interface violently with the ten meters of carbonaceous chondrite rock that separate Clarkeville from the surface. But even as a native-born Cerean with a lifetime’s use of Velcro sandals, there are still plenty of bumps on my head to prove where I’ve given in to incautious impulses. So now I forced myself to sit quietly, impatiently watching the ducks in their pond in Westlake Park.

Isabel floated into the café with her usual grace, her feet hardly seeming to touch the pavement. She pecked at my cheek, then shook her glossy black bangs as she told the hovering waiter—a robot, of course—to bring her usual Pernod. I started to tell her about the incredible good fortune that was about to accrue to us, then stopped cold. Isabel’s face was pale and drawn, and she looked as unhappy as I had ever seen her. She has a high-powered job in the assessor’s office of City Hall, so naturally I assumed that something bad must have happened at work. But no.

“It’s Valérie-France,” she said grimly. “It’s even worse than we imagined.”

My heart sank, and I gripped my own glass of Campari and soda. Valérie-France was our four-year-old. “You mean—”

“Yes.”

Four or five years ago Isabel and I had planned to get married and have a couple of children but Psych Service had turned us down. Isabel’s latent attraction to other women, they said in their dogmatic way, made the chances of the two of us having a successful 23-year marriage something less than 25 percent. That assessment had come as a vast surprise to Isabel, who had always considered herself as straight as a mathematician’s line, but who could argue with Psych Service?

If you want to have children on Ceres you have to be able to guarantee that there’ll be a stable family environment until the child reaches his or her 22nd birthday. So, of course, once Psych Service had spoken there were no wedding bells for Jonathan and Isabel. We could have emigrated to some other world such as Pallas where the requirements aren’t so strict, but we both had roots in Ceres. So Isabel married a lovely girl named Jin Tshei and they lived more or less happily ever after.

A little while alter the marriage, I was invited to contribute the necessary genetic material for the creation of a little girl—the adorable Valérie-France, in fact. Now I dropped by for pleasant weekends with Isabel and Jin Tshei and my daughter two or three times a month.

Isabel forced a smile when her drink came and clinked her glass against mine. “You first,” she said. “Bad news can always wait. Just why are you looking so incredibly radiant?”

I sighed. “I was looking forward to telling you that the moment had come when we’re finally going to make our fortunes—legitimately. We’re going to float Ling Wong Guoy a stock issue for a company specializing in truffles. Then we’ll—”

“That’s good, because we’re going to need a fortune,” interrupted Isabel. “Valérie-France is going to have to spend at least fourteen years on Earth! And she’s going to need special medical care while she’s there. We’re not going to need a fortune, we’re going to need three fortunes!”

“It’s that bad?”

“Kesler’s Syndrome. As bad a case as they’ve ever seen.”

“But that’s impossible,” I protested. “Either you get it as soon as you’re away from Maternity Rock—”

“—Or you don’t get it at all.” Isabel gulped a quarter of her glass of Pernod. “Except for the one person in 10,000 who doesn’t develop it as an infant—and does later on.”

“Oh,” I said glumly. There were 9,781,549 people on Ceres as of that date, September 23, 2279, which meant that somewhere there were at least 978 others like Valérie-France around—not, of course, that that was any consolation.

In their fourth month of pregnancy, all the Belt’s mothers-to-be remove to Maternity Rock, a 1.0-gravity facility in permanent orbit next to Pallas. If they don’t, they’re not allowed to bring the fetus to term. Every now and then you hear about a woman who manages to slip the medical surveillance network long enough to give birth outside the Rock. The consequences are not pretty for either mother or child and I don’t like to think about them.

But even the perfectly normal children born on the Rock have to begin taking their gravity pills as soon as they leave at the age of one month. Otherwise they end up looking like my boss at Hartman, Bemis & Choupette—short, round, and rather fully covered with hair. His parents, who were religious fanatics of some sort or other, had stopped giving little J. Davis Alexander his pills as soon as he’d been taken home. His subsequent looks had not improved his disposition as an adult, as I knew from ample first-hand experience.

Not wanting Valérie-France to look like my esteemed boss, we had faithfully given her the daily doses. All, apparently, for naught. According to Isabel, Kesler’s Syndrome manifested itself, if at all, between the ages of three and five. For reasons unknown, the pills simply stopped working. We—Isabel, Jin Tshei, and I—now had a choice.

If we wanted Valérie-France to grow up short, round, and as hairy as a wolverine, with disposition to match, we could do nothing at all.

If we wanted her to grow up long and lean as a young man’s dream —like most Belters are—we could send her to Earth and keep her there until her normal growth had stabilized, an age that was generally defined as being eighteen to nineteen.